Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Future Funding of Higher Education: Discussion

Photo of Pauline O'ReillyPauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Six years on from the Cassells report, we are still having the conversation. It is correct that we are having a conversation, as all the witnesses have pointed out. We need an ongoing debate around it. We are behind the setting up of a new Department on the basis that this will be sorted out. It should be sorted out in two ways. First, some of the money that is going in at the moment is clearly to keep things at a stand-still position, as the witnesses have outlined. That needs to change and requires significant investment.

Alongside that there has been an ingraining of inequality over the past few decades. It is always displayed in our education system when it comes to who has access and who does not. We have had conversations about private schooling and we are now having conversations about who can and cannot afford to go to college and who can and cannot afford accommodation. I take on board the different points of view as to whether fees should be abolished. Apart from anything, an expansion of SUSI grants has to be provided at the very minimum for those who are entitled. It was part of previous budgets but it needs to go beyond that.

I believe we are in the middle of a revolution comparable to the industrial revolution. We need massive amounts of new skills and new investment and capital to get us over the hump of a lack of skills. That is where we are at the moment. We are putting money into retrofitting and so many different green areas. We have to get over the hump and get a massive number of people skilled in those areas. I do not think the system is up to scratch at the moment. That is not the fault of anybody here but it is the fault of decades of underinvestment, as has been outlined. I would appreciate any thoughts the witnesses have on this new aspect that is being demanded of them and of us all as a society. Many of these kinds of revolutions go unseen because we are in the middle of them. That is exactly what is happening at the moment.

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